Founded in 2009, Hoopla is a talented team of sales, technology, and motivational psychology experts. They’ve got the know-how to get the best out of teams and employees and are absolutely obsessed with building fun and interactive software tools that inspire performance and drive results in the workplace.

Hoopla was started by Mike Smalls to solve real problems. As a Sales Executive, Mike found it difficult to give top performers the recognition they deserved and even more difficult to keep track of teams and crucial stats in real time. Mike dreamed of a way to bolster sales performance and enhance their company culture. As one of the pioneers in the employment of Game Mechanics in the workplace, Hoopla is proving to be a unique solution for companies looking to inspire performance, increase productivity and connect their workforce across the whole organization.

As one of Think it First’s comprehensive brand development clients, Hoopla acknowledged the many advantages to the “Think it First” strategy method. Below is a breakdown of the Strategic Marketing methodology behind our engagement with Hoopla. This is Strategy before Action:

• First, we worked extensively with the leadership team at Hoopla to uncover their Current Strategy.
• Then we did an in-depth Competitive Analysis, helping to uncover potential opportunities and hurdles in the market.
• We then created Performance Indicators that will serve as benchmarks to the success of the project over the course of 12 months.
• We then, focused on giving the Hoopla brand an identity and reorganizing the structure of the company as the customer sees it.
• Our next effort was to uncover how the Hoopla brand fits into the Gamification environment and how we plan to strategically position the company against competition. In this part, we uncover what makes Hoopla distinct and desirable, and how to communicate that with the world.
• In the effort to create a visual system of communication and language that speaks directly to their needs, we needed to identify the Hoopla customer base, what they value, and offer Hoopla’s targeted solutions in response to the problems each may face.
• It was then up to us to develop a plan on how to deliver on what we’ve uncovered, a platform for our marketing strategy and the tactics we will use to communicate the Hoopla message to specified target audiences. In the short term, our first big challenges was a complete website redesign to accurately convey the advantages to Hoopla, and then, through video, promote how the products are actually helping real customers.
• We even worked with Hoopla to develop a new pricing structure matrix that would garner more long term users and provoke those skeptical about the product, to try it. And finally, are working on creating a 12 month running schedule and budget displaying all of the marketing tactics necessary to achieve our strategy and how they pan out over the course of the year.

Hoopla is a completely radical way to attack motivation and employee engagement in the workplace. Think it First has been there to help the team overcome hurdles, provide creative direction, develop copy and content, provide video production and storyboard direction, and drive the messaging and visuals that ultimately define the brand in the minds of customers. It has been a dream working with such sharp people at Hoopla and we’re confident they will go far, so stay tuned for the next chapter in our growth, together.

Interested? Follow Hoopla on Twitter @hooplasoftware